Operation Husky Military Analysis
The Allied Forces sought to perform joint operations during Operation HUSKY, but the joint operational concepts taken for granted today were underdeveloped in 1943. The awkward attempt by the Allies to command and control this operation combined with the unfamiliar practice of integrating joint functions prevented the Allies from fully from recognizing and exploiting the opportunities for decisive action on Sicily. This paper first evaluates the operational level command and control of Operation HUSKY against the three attributes of mission command, generally finding underdeveloped intent and gaps in trust and understanding. Secondly, it evaluates the integration of two joint functions, fires and intelligence, finding that both functions were
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poorly integrated with others at the operational level. Command and Control (C2) is defined as a joint function, where Command is inclusive of the authority and responsibility, which utilizes available resources by motivating and directing the action of people and organizations to effectively accomplish the assigned missions; while, Control supports the Command by providing an efficient decision-making process through enabled and timely intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Furthermore, C2 provides the means for a joint force commander to synchronize assigned or attached forces and to integrate joint force activities and functions to achieve unity of command and effort while supported to varying degrees throughout the operation by information systems and communications. The following evaluation focuses on the mission command tenet of Allied Forces C2. The Allied Forces’ C2 lacked the central aspects of mission command which stunted the Allied initiative and usurped their ability to exploit decisive opportunities in Sicily. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff broke down mission command into three key attributes: intent, trust, and understanding. There exist several accounts where Allied Forces executed Operation HUSKY with an intent that was inconsiderate of the overall purpose of the war. Whether it was lack of trust or differing perspectives among allies, the clarity of Operation HUSKY’s purpose and its desired end state remained questionable. While the Americans wanted Operation HUSKY to be the last operational mission in the Mediterranean, the British regarded it as the first step toward an aim at the soft-underbelly of Axis Europe. In Casablanca, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided the initial intent for Sicily; that was, to divert Germany’s attention from the Russian Front and force the Italians out of the war by exploiting the Allies’ impending victory in North Africa. However, the intent of the operations in Sicily did not fully reflect the overarching intent the war, which was to defeat the German Army. This misaimed operational intent underwrote the decisions that U.S. Generals Dwight Eisenhower and British General Sir Harold Alexander made throughout the operation. Consider Alexander’s decision to send the 7th U.S. Army to Palermo. Given that Palermo revealed some redeeming public affairs benefits, it ultimately gave the Germans time to escape. Some mentioned a timid approach in the initial planning that showed when Allied Forces did not land closer to Messina to trap Axis land forces. This point questions Eisenhower’s intent to exploit any opportunity to decisively engage land forces to defeat significant elements of the German Army. The trust among the Allies during Operation HUSKY should be remembered as a work in progress. With good reason, the British doubted the American Forces’ fighting ability after Operation TORCH; conversely, the Americans distrusted the British intent in the Mediterranean. General Martin Dempsey wrote that trust informs intent and that operations will move at the “speed of trust.” At the strategic level, trust seemed the strongest, where in Casablanca Roosevelt and Churchill agreed with the merits of the Sicily operation. Meanwhile, at the operational level, trust among Allies and between component forces was not established. Within the land forces, General Alexander gave the Eighth British Army the main effort while relegating the Seven U.S. Army to guarding the Eighth’s left flank. Among components, air arm commanders were unwilling to permit any perceived loss of control and jealously protected their authority to the point of not fulfilling needed air support. Mission command empowers individuals to exercise judgment on how to accomplish the mission and how to exploit the human element emphasizing trust. In Operation HUSKY, operational commanders still exercised judgment; however, due to lack of trust, their decisions partly undermined operational effectiveness. In evaluating the attribute of understanding, this paper finds that the Seventh U.S.
and Eight British Armies’ Commanders understood what Roosevelt and Churchill wanted, but other key operational commanders did not. In other words, British General Bernard Montgomery and U.S. Lieutenant General George Patton understood the initial intent of Operation HUSKY, but they recognized the opportunities and realized the importance of defeating the German Army. According to modern doctrine, “the thorough understanding of the commander’s intent at every level” is essential to mission command; furthermore, “commander’s intent fosters communication and understanding with all subordinates.” Additionally, understanding gives operational commanders the required “insight and foresight” to make good decisions, manage risk, and to reflect on future effects. It’s been noted that General Eisenhower allowed subordinate headquarters in geographically separated locations, which complicated mission command. This contributed to the lack of understanding at the supreme commander level; in turn, Eisenhower’s headquarters remained blind to the developing opportunities in Sicily and unable to integrate air and sea power to spoil the German escape. The race for Messina wasn’t just a competition between Allied rivals; it was an attempt at decisive action. Patton demonstrated this understanding by launching a series of amphibious assaults to get ahead of the German’s exit of Sicily. Conversely, the lack …show more content…
of understanding throughout the Seventh U.S. Army during entry operations, led to the fratricide of 10% of the paratroop force. Understanding, due to its strong interrelation with intent and trust, wasn’t any better than these other attributes of mission command. The weaknesses in each attribute contributed to the degradation of the overall effectiveness of Operation HUSKY leaving opportunities to improve Allied Forces’ C2 in follow-on operations.
This paper also evaluated Operation HUSKY’s integration of the joint functions of fires and intelligence; and, it asserts that fires were only partially integrated with the protection, movement and maneuver, and logistics functions, while intelligence failed to factor into decisions regarding fires and movement and maneuver. Integration is “[t]he arrangement of military forces and their actions to create a force that operates by engaging as a whole,” and it is how the joint functions reinforce and complement each other. The Allied Forces displayed good joint fires integration of its maritime forces’ fire support to complement maneuver and logistics, while it experience inadequate integration of fires from its air forces.
The joint fires function is coordinated action in support of a common objective to produce desired results which are delivered during the employment of forces from multiple components. With the absence of the Sherman Tank and the subsequent lack of land-delivered firepower during their initial landings onto Sicily, the Seventh U.S. Army’s call for air support went unfulfilled; instead, some elements of the Allied Naval Forces’ Western Task Force moved closer to shore to provide ship to shore fires. This integration of naval fires would be repeated by the Allies along the northern coast of Sicily protecting one of Patton’s divisions and assuring logistics forward of Palermo. The German Luftwaffe lost about 40% of its aircraft before Operation HUSKY began and the Allies gained an air superiority of roughly two and a half Allied aircraft to each Axis aircraft; yet, the Allies failed to integrate fires to negate German air attacks that caused significant damage to several Allied ships. Joint fires integration met the standard in terms of providing joint fire support from maritime forces during the initial landings on Sicily, while other fires integration did not; thus, joint fires were not fully integrated with joint protection, nor with movement and maneuver. Lastly,
joint fires integration proved insufficient to interdict the German Army’s maneuvers to escape and it failed to counter the Luftwaffe’s capability to harass land and maritime forces. The Allies ineffectually integrated joint intelligence with the joint functions of fires, movement and maneuver, and C2, which diminished the outcome of Operation HUSKY. The intelligence function includes data collection, the analysis of information, and the production of intelligence among other process components. The collection of data from the race to Messina seemingly never reached the Allied Forces Headquarters or the analysis of information failed to yield the intelligence of the German Army’s well-orchestrated escape. For example, there were a couple indications that the Germans were deliberately escaping over a two week period, where human intelligence failed to inform the Allied Forces Commander. On August 3rd of 1943, the German Army abandoned Catania to the Eastern Task Force, then on August 7th the Western Task Force discovered that the 29th Panzer Grenadiers withdrew to the east. The German escape was complete by August 17th. Slow intelligence integration led to sluggish decision making, and serves as an example where the Allied Forces Headquarters’ observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop did not match the Germans’. Poor joint intelligence integration undercut decisive Allied action, and it caused inaction at the straits of Messina. In conclusion, Allied Forces conducted Operation HUSKY with a limiting intent, unestablished trust among component services and allies, and with spotty understanding throughout its formations. Although fires and intelligence integration with C2, movement and maneuver, and protection showed room for improvement, the operation accomplished its strategic and operational goals to take Sicily, knock Italy out of the war, commit German forces from the Russia, and gain control of the Mediterranean Sea. The Allied Forces sought to perform joint operations during the planning and execution of Operation HUSKY, but the joint operational concepts taken for granted today were underdeveloped in 1943. The Allies’ awkward attempt to C2 this operation combined with the inexperienced practice of integrating joint functions prevented the Allies from fully from recognizing and exploiting the opportunities for decisive action on Sicily.
poorly integrated with others at the operational level. Command and Control (C2) is defined as a joint function, where Command is inclusive of the authority and responsibility, which utilizes available resources by motivating and directing the action of people and organizations to effectively accomplish the assigned missions; while, Control supports the Command by providing an efficient decision-making process through enabled and timely intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Furthermore, C2 provides the means for a joint force commander to synchronize assigned or attached forces and to integrate joint force activities and functions to achieve unity of command and effort while supported to varying degrees throughout the operation by information systems and communications. The following evaluation focuses on the mission command tenet of Allied Forces C2. The Allied Forces’ C2 lacked the central aspects of mission command which stunted the Allied initiative and usurped their ability to exploit decisive opportunities in Sicily. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff broke down mission command into three key attributes: intent, trust, and understanding. There exist several accounts where Allied Forces executed Operation HUSKY with an intent that was inconsiderate of the overall purpose of the war. Whether it was lack of trust or differing perspectives among allies, the clarity of Operation HUSKY’s purpose and its desired end state remained questionable. While the Americans wanted Operation HUSKY to be the last operational mission in the Mediterranean, the British regarded it as the first step toward an aim at the soft-underbelly of Axis Europe. In Casablanca, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided the initial intent for Sicily; that was, to divert Germany’s attention from the Russian Front and force the Italians out of the war by exploiting the Allies’ impending victory in North Africa. However, the intent of the operations in Sicily did not fully reflect the overarching intent the war, which was to defeat the German Army. This misaimed operational intent underwrote the decisions that U.S. Generals Dwight Eisenhower and British General Sir Harold Alexander made throughout the operation. Consider Alexander’s decision to send the 7th U.S. Army to Palermo. Given that Palermo revealed some redeeming public affairs benefits, it ultimately gave the Germans time to escape. Some mentioned a timid approach in the initial planning that showed when Allied Forces did not land closer to Messina to trap Axis land forces. This point questions Eisenhower’s intent to exploit any opportunity to decisively engage land forces to defeat significant elements of the German Army. The trust among the Allies during Operation HUSKY should be remembered as a work in progress. With good reason, the British doubted the American Forces’ fighting ability after Operation TORCH; conversely, the Americans distrusted the British intent in the Mediterranean. General Martin Dempsey wrote that trust informs intent and that operations will move at the “speed of trust.” At the strategic level, trust seemed the strongest, where in Casablanca Roosevelt and Churchill agreed with the merits of the Sicily operation. Meanwhile, at the operational level, trust among Allies and between component forces was not established. Within the land forces, General Alexander gave the Eighth British Army the main effort while relegating the Seven U.S. Army to guarding the Eighth’s left flank. Among components, air arm commanders were unwilling to permit any perceived loss of control and jealously protected their authority to the point of not fulfilling needed air support. Mission command empowers individuals to exercise judgment on how to accomplish the mission and how to exploit the human element emphasizing trust. In Operation HUSKY, operational commanders still exercised judgment; however, due to lack of trust, their decisions partly undermined operational effectiveness. In evaluating the attribute of understanding, this paper finds that the Seventh U.S.
and Eight British Armies’ Commanders understood what Roosevelt and Churchill wanted, but other key operational commanders did not. In other words, British General Bernard Montgomery and U.S. Lieutenant General George Patton understood the initial intent of Operation HUSKY, but they recognized the opportunities and realized the importance of defeating the German Army. According to modern doctrine, “the thorough understanding of the commander’s intent at every level” is essential to mission command; furthermore, “commander’s intent fosters communication and understanding with all subordinates.” Additionally, understanding gives operational commanders the required “insight and foresight” to make good decisions, manage risk, and to reflect on future effects. It’s been noted that General Eisenhower allowed subordinate headquarters in geographically separated locations, which complicated mission command. This contributed to the lack of understanding at the supreme commander level; in turn, Eisenhower’s headquarters remained blind to the developing opportunities in Sicily and unable to integrate air and sea power to spoil the German escape. The race for Messina wasn’t just a competition between Allied rivals; it was an attempt at decisive action. Patton demonstrated this understanding by launching a series of amphibious assaults to get ahead of the German’s exit of Sicily. Conversely, the lack …show more content…
of understanding throughout the Seventh U.S. Army during entry operations, led to the fratricide of 10% of the paratroop force. Understanding, due to its strong interrelation with intent and trust, wasn’t any better than these other attributes of mission command. The weaknesses in each attribute contributed to the degradation of the overall effectiveness of Operation HUSKY leaving opportunities to improve Allied Forces’ C2 in follow-on operations.
This paper also evaluated Operation HUSKY’s integration of the joint functions of fires and intelligence; and, it asserts that fires were only partially integrated with the protection, movement and maneuver, and logistics functions, while intelligence failed to factor into decisions regarding fires and movement and maneuver. Integration is “[t]he arrangement of military forces and their actions to create a force that operates by engaging as a whole,” and it is how the joint functions reinforce and complement each other. The Allied Forces displayed good joint fires integration of its maritime forces’ fire support to complement maneuver and logistics, while it experience inadequate integration of fires from its air forces.
The joint fires function is coordinated action in support of a common objective to produce desired results which are delivered during the employment of forces from multiple components. With the absence of the Sherman Tank and the subsequent lack of land-delivered firepower during their initial landings onto Sicily, the Seventh U.S. Army’s call for air support went unfulfilled; instead, some elements of the Allied Naval Forces’ Western Task Force moved closer to shore to provide ship to shore fires. This integration of naval fires would be repeated by the Allies along the northern coast of Sicily protecting one of Patton’s divisions and assuring logistics forward of Palermo. The German Luftwaffe lost about 40% of its aircraft before Operation HUSKY began and the Allies gained an air superiority of roughly two and a half Allied aircraft to each Axis aircraft; yet, the Allies failed to integrate fires to negate German air attacks that caused significant damage to several Allied ships. Joint fires integration met the standard in terms of providing joint fire support from maritime forces during the initial landings on Sicily, while other fires integration did not; thus, joint fires were not fully integrated with joint protection, nor with movement and maneuver. Lastly,
joint fires integration proved insufficient to interdict the German Army’s maneuvers to escape and it failed to counter the Luftwaffe’s capability to harass land and maritime forces. The Allies ineffectually integrated joint intelligence with the joint functions of fires, movement and maneuver, and C2, which diminished the outcome of Operation HUSKY. The intelligence function includes data collection, the analysis of information, and the production of intelligence among other process components. The collection of data from the race to Messina seemingly never reached the Allied Forces Headquarters or the analysis of information failed to yield the intelligence of the German Army’s well-orchestrated escape. For example, there were a couple indications that the Germans were deliberately escaping over a two week period, where human intelligence failed to inform the Allied Forces Commander. On August 3rd of 1943, the German Army abandoned Catania to the Eastern Task Force, then on August 7th the Western Task Force discovered that the 29th Panzer Grenadiers withdrew to the east. The German escape was complete by August 17th. Slow intelligence integration led to sluggish decision making, and serves as an example where the Allied Forces Headquarters’ observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop did not match the Germans’. Poor joint intelligence integration undercut decisive Allied action, and it caused inaction at the straits of Messina. In conclusion, Allied Forces conducted Operation HUSKY with a limiting intent, unestablished trust among component services and allies, and with spotty understanding throughout its formations. Although fires and intelligence integration with C2, movement and maneuver, and protection showed room for improvement, the operation accomplished its strategic and operational goals to take Sicily, knock Italy out of the war, commit German forces from the Russia, and gain control of the Mediterranean Sea. The Allied Forces sought to perform joint operations during the planning and execution of Operation HUSKY, but the joint operational concepts taken for granted today were underdeveloped in 1943. The Allies’ awkward attempt to C2 this operation combined with the inexperienced practice of integrating joint functions prevented the Allies from fully from recognizing and exploiting the opportunities for decisive action on Sicily.